The Secret Agent
Rating 7/10 Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho has spent the last decade making movies rooted in everyday life, but tinged with strangeness. American audiences know him for Aquarius and Bacurau. These films have small but passionate followings. The Secret Agent, buoyed by four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, is his most accessible work yet. At […]
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
Rating 6/10 The 28 movies have become a franchise of footpaths branching off in strange, occasionally inspired directions. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is the fourth installment overall, but the second chapter in the 28 Years Later trilogy, penned by Alex Garland. Survival in this world is no longer about rebuilding. It’s about learning […]
Bugonia
Rating 8/10 I have a complicated relationship with director Yorgos Lanthimos. I don’t share his pessimistic worldview, but I admire his craft. I appreciated The Favourite for its wit, but I disliked Poor Things, which was more shock than substance. So when Bugonia came out last October, I heard that Emma Stone’s character was subjected […]
No Other Choice
Rating 6/10 Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) is a longtime employee at Solar Paper whose comfortable life falls apart after a corporate takeover. Although unemployed, he assumes this will be but a brief detour. However, it stretches into a year of low-pay retail work. The threat of losing his home also looms. After a humiliating interview, he […]
Greenland 2: Migration
Rating 6/10 At a certain point, all post-apocalyptic survival movies begin to feel like variations on the same theme. Oh, sure, the disaster is different: a virus, a celestial object, climate collapse, zombies, but the story always ends up in the same place. Families on the move, supplies running low, and the real danger turning […]
The Housemaid
Rating 7/10 Few movies test the limits of ‘why doesn’t she just quit?’ quite like The Housemaid. Millie Calloway (Sydney Sweeney) has just been released after a decade behind bars and desperately needs a job. She arrives at the sprawling Long Island home for an interview for a live-in housekeeper. Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried) is […]
Marty Supreme
Rating 8/10 Forget what you heard. Marty Supreme is not a sports biopic about a ping-pong phenom. I went in expecting a straightforward drama about the American table tennis player Marty Reisman. Sure, it draws loose inspiration from the real-life professional player who did, in fact, work as a novelty act during intermissions and pregame […]
MY TOP 10 MOVIES FOR 2025
I love movies. No surprise there, but 2025 had genuine highs and lows. Studios always focus on sequels and remakes, but they really doubled down this year. The box office reflected that. A Minecraft Movie, Lilo & Stitch, Superman, Jurassic World Rebirth, and Zootopia 2 were the biggest hits in the US. Some worked. Others […]
My Top 10 Films of 2025
I saw a lot of great movies in 2025. Here’s where I reflect on the past 365 days and pick the ten films I loved the most. PLUS, an additional ten that just barely missed that list. Click the link to reveal… ** My Top 10 Films of 2025 ** Watching all these films is […]
Song Sung Blue
Rating 8/10 Why make a movie about a Neil Diamond tribute band rather than Neil Diamond himself? Why devote two hours of screen time to people who aren’t revolutionary? These questions assume that cinema exists only to celebrate the creatives who change history. Sometimes the unheralded stories of interesting nobodies can be just as, if […]